It's him! Rudy thought as, hand in hand, he and Tir ascended the laundry-festooned Royal Stair. It's him! For the first time, Tir's memories had touched something that lay verifiably in the original Time of the Dark.

The old man with the big nose and the bald head and the tattoos on his scalp and hands was-had to be-the Guy with the Cats.

Records did not stretch to the first rising of the Dark. Gil and Ingold had unearthed archives dating back seven hundred years at Gae; two of the books salvaged from the wreck of the City of Wizards were copies of copies-said to be accurate-of volumes two thousand years old.

The Church archives the ill-famed and unlamented Bishop Govannin had carried from the broken capital contained scrolls nearly that age, in dialects and tongues with which Ingold, for all his great scholarship, was wholly unfamiliar. When the mage and Gil had a chance to work on them, they had arrived at approximate translations of two or three-at least two of the others Gil guessed had been copied visually, without any knowledge of their meaning at all. But in the Keep attics above the fifth level, in the hidden crypts below, and in the river caves up the valley, they had found gray crystalline polyhedrons, the size and shape of the milk-white glowstones: remnants of the technology of the Times Before. And when Gil figured out that the gray crystals were records, and Ingold learned how to read the images within, they got their first glimpse of what the world had been like before that catastrophe over three millennia ago.

The Guy with the Cats was in two of the record crystals. The crystals themselves were magic, and readable only through the object Rudy described to himself as a scrying table found hidden in an untouched corner chamber of the third level south. But less than a dozen of the thirty-eight were about magic, about how to do magic.